Eruptive lightnings flutter to and fro
Above the heights of immemorial hills;
Thirst-stricken air, dumb-throated, in its woe
Limply down-sagging, its limp body spills
Upon the earth. A panting silence fills
The empty vault of Night with shimmering bars
Of sullen silver, where the lake distils
Its misered bounty.—Hark! No whisper mars
The utter silence of the untranslated stars.
This poem is in the public domain.
All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.
This poem is in the public domain.
The weather map today is pale. The lines on the map are like the casts of fishing lines looping and curved briefly across air. The sky now, also, toward evening, is pale. On Sunday, in Beacon, there were lines drawn on walls and also lines drawn across the canvases of the last paintings of Agnes Martin. One of them has two pale squares on a blackened field. The lines on your walls follows directions as if as if there were a kind of logic charged with motion at the end of winter: the pale blue northern cold almost merged with the pale green at Hartford, and then the blank newsprint of the sea.
From Or To Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach. Copyright © 2009 by Ann Lauterbach. Used by permission of Penguin. All rights reserved.
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
This poem is in the public domain.